New Business Attributed to Demonstrable Process Improvement Payback with In-Year ROI, And Growing Interest in a New User Process Analytics Solution Introduced in 2011

OpenSpan announced record-setting revenue and net income for the fourth quarter of 2011, resulting in a record revenue year. The company sold 47 percent more user licenses in 2011 compared to 2010. New customers included several Global 500 companies in financial services, telecommunications, insurance, healthcare and other industries. Organizations in 16 countries turned to OpenSpan in their efforts to increase efficiency and improve operations.

The company’s success is attributed to increased adoption of its user process improvement technology in both customer-facing and back-office scenarios where time-to-solution and return on investment are paramount. New customer engagements were also accelerated by the introduction of Desktop Analytics, an automated user process monitoring and operational performance measurement solution. Economic pressures are prompting organizations to look for new ways to discover opportunities for improving efficiency by measuring user activity, then simplifying or automating those processes within their existing infrastructure, according to OpenSpan CEO Eric Musser.

“Despite difficult economic conditions worldwide, OpenSpan enjoyed a successful 2011 as call centers and back-office operations looked for ways to improve user processes quickly and cost-effectively,” Musser said. “We saw an increasing emphasis on project payback, with companies looking for solutions with in-year ROI. The more companies are focused on achieving demonstrable results quickly, the more successful we are. We’re pleased to enter 2012 with a healthy pipeline and growing interest in our solutions.”

OpenSpan also released initial results of implementation assessments measuring the impact of its technology on customer productivity and efficiency. Results show an estimated cost savings for customers worldwide at more than $1.6 billion. Increased efficiencies in contact center implementations resulted in an estimated average productivity gain of 19 percent. Customer back-office process improvement projects resulted in an increase in productivity estimated at 29 percent. Estimates of the impact of OpenSpan technology deployments are customer-validated and are based on formal process improvement assessments conducted by OpenSpan’s Six Sigma process consultants.

OpenSpan also owes much of its success to the strong support of its business partners, who represented just under one-third of total revenue in 2011. New reseller relationships, primarily with call center solution providers, helped OpenSpan expand its footprint in seven countries. New partnerships are in place in the U.S., Australia, Germany, India, Spain and the United Arab Emirates. In addition, OpenSpan expanded relationships with business process outsourcers (BPOs) worldwide, leading to the company’s first deployment in China. OpenSpan sells direct, via resellers and through OEM relationships.

OpenSpan, a privately held corporation, is backed by FTV Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Imlay Investments, Matrix Partners and Sigma Partners. OpenSpan also received new venture funding in 2011 from In-Q-Tel (IQT). IQT identifies, adapts and delivers innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader U.S. intelligence community.

Expands Insurance Industry Offerings To Include Claims Repair Process Automation for Payers

OpenSpan, Inc., an innovative provider of business process analytics, optimization and automation solutions, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Triangle BPA, LLC, headquartered in the Research Triangle region of Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.  The acquisition follows a year-long partnership between the two companies in support of insurance industry customers. OpenSpan has secured rights to intellectual property for Triangle BPA’s health insurance payer claim automation tools and techniques, as well as adding key senior staff with extensive industry expertise to the OpenSpan executive team.

According to Triangle BPA Co-founder Rod Dunlap, it became clear that combining the capabilities of the two companies created a comprehensive approach to the business process optimization and automation needs of the insurance industry.  “Working with OpenSpan, we quickly saw the power and value of a unified offering,” said Dunlap. “Together, we are well-positioned to have a dramatic impact on health payers’ efforts to reduce administrative costs, comply with changing regulations, accelerate service, and reduce waste and errors with a compelling, fully automated claim repair solution.”

Acquisition Completes Groundbreaking Business Process Automation Solution for Accelerated Auto-Adjudication of Insurance Claim Repairs

Triangle BPA’s Claim Control Engine™, a business process automation engine for accelerated health insurance claim auto-adjudication, is being rebranded and relaunched this week as the OpenSpan Automation Engine™.  It manages specialized, reusable components containing business rules and repair actions in a service-oriented architecture.  These reusable components are assembled into customized claims processes that automate repairs. Components can be iteratively enhanced and reused across multiple repair scenarios for fast time-to-deployment, giving insurance payers tremendous flexibility to react to changes such as claims inventory fluctuations, new regulations, and member or provider service needs.

The engine executes claim repairs via a foundational set of business process definitions and integration services called Reinacts, a Triangle BPA solution that is retaining its brand under the OpenSpan auspices. Reinacts are customizable process automation templates based on the most common claims adjudication practices.  Automations are configured and integrated with core systems in the insurance back-office using OpenSpan’s visual development environment.  OpenSpan accelerates business rule definition with a process analytics tool for automated business process discovery.

Acquisition Signals Growing Strength In Back Office Business Process Solutions

OpenSpan has served customers in the insurance industry for years, with numerous front-line and back-office implementations. Increasingly, organizations across many industries are turning to the back office as the next frontier for accelerating enterprise efficiency and performance.  The acquisition of Triangle BPA is the first initiative of a strategic expansion into additional back-office environments, where more than a third of current customer implementations are found today, according to OpenSpan CEO Eric Musser.  “We have enjoyed tremendous success over the years helping contact centers and other front-office operations simplify and automate business processes across multiple applications on a worker’s desktop.  Our technology is also widely used in back-office environments that are perhaps less visible, but have just as much impact on customer relationships and operational costs as does the front office,” Musser said.

Every day, EVERY DAY, when I was at work I would have to copy and paste between multiple applications. And not just once or twice but over and over throughout the day. And it was always the same, first names, last names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. And even though I had gotten very good at it and could Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V and tab or mouse my way through with the best of them, I just new that they time it was taking must really add up, especially when multiplied out by all my co-workers who had to go through the same thing. I would always wonder, ‘why am I still doing this’ and ‘can there not be a way for me not to have to do this anymore’? I think it became one of those tasks at work that I, along with my co-workers and millions and millions of others I am sure, was resigned to doing.

So why was it like this? Why did I have to accept the fact that my SAP applications couldn’t talk, so to speak, to my Salesforce ones or my company’s custom built or legacy applications for that matter? I think two reasons contributed to this more than anything else. First, copying and pasting had become a natural flow of keystrokes or mouse clicks that I was just willing to accept as part of what I had to do. To me it was just an extension of typing. Second, and perhaps the biggest reason, is that I didn’t think getting rid of task like copying and pasting was even possible.

The first reason makes sense. I, like most of us, learned a task the way I learned it and then as it became more and more repetitive, I just became better and better at it to the point where even though I still had to do it, I was so fast at it, I didn’t really care about doing it or look at it as a real hindrance to my job performance. So copying and pasting of basic information between applications had just become an accepted part of the process. I could also look at the fact that copying and pasting the information rather than having to re-type it all from one application to another was in itself a significant process improvement. Now the second the reason, regarding it being even possible to eliminate the need to copy and paste all together, I guess it’s one of those things where I thought to myself, someone has probably figured this out, but it probably takes a lot of custom coding and wouldn’t be easy to implement especially not when dealing with multiple systems and even some that were custom built. Something like that just wouldn’t really seem a high priority for most IT departments who support multiple users of multiple applications.

It wasn’t until I came to OpenSpan that I found the way that there was an easy solution for this common task that affects millions of users on a daily basis. OpenSpan’s software has eliminated the need to copy and paste between applications has been solved and the solution itself can be implemented in under 5 minutes. Better still, once rolled out to all users who work with multiple applications and need to copy and paste information between them, it can really save a tremendous amount of time. To really grasp the amount of time it can save, imagine what solution like this could mean for a 600 seat call center or a bank with 50 branches. The more opportunities at the user level to eliminate copying and pasting, the more time is saved and the more productive your employees can become. To see just how easy it is, watch our short video demonstration using the OpenSpan technology and then register on our community site and try it yourself.

I spent this week onsite in Baltimore helping a customer architect some automation scenarios where the goal of this exercise was not only to reduce the average handling time of the contact center agents but also make them more productive and provide better customer service.

One of the issues we identified during the discovery phase of this project was the lack of ability of the users to recognize customers with flagged accounts or important alerts to need to be reviewed when get in touch with the contact center.

The current system provides a black triangle image close to the right corner of the screen while the account information is on the left corner. Ha! Don’t get me wrong but who in the world designed a condition like that?
Something that has to be brought to the agent’s attention in black on a gray background. Nah! It’s not gonna work.

Frankly, now I understand why these agents were not able to check that alert and keep that in mind during the call or take action according to the information provided there. They couldn’t see it. Agents working all day long taking calls and in front of their computers with the exact same applications all day start not recognizing small changes. It’s a fact! You gotta do something better and give them a better experience if you want to have a better customer service.

So, we fixed that issue… and more than that… We didn’t change a line of code on their systems.
OpenSpan has a very nice capability to recognize when a control (button, image, textbox, dropbox, etc) is created, changed, clicked or whatever happens with it.
OpenSpan also has a method called ShowToolTip which works for Windows and Web applications.
The quick solution to the issue described here was to combine these two OpenSpan capabilities.
To give you some details, when the agent was getting the account information for the call we setup an event “listening” for the alert image creation on the screen. As soon as we recognize that condition we then read the Outer HTML property of that image because that would be the text displayed on our tooltip and finally display the tooltip for 10 seconds. In a non-intrusive way we brought the agent’s attention to where we needed so they could see the alert without clicking on anything and kept working on their call without any interruption.
What colors we decided to use??? Well, we decided to do it in OpenSpan Orange-like and since we were in Baltimore why not to say that was an Orioles sponsored tool tip.

It came out similar to this:

There are so many use cases for an implementation like that. From process guidance to bringing the agent’s attention to certain aspects and everything in between.

If you’re interested about the tooltip capability take a look on the OpenSpan Online Documentation available here.

On a recent PoC (Proof-of-Concept) I had to add items from two comboboxes to a Windows Form combobox. Here is a simple solution to that:

1. Highlight the combobox control in Object Explorer and click the Explore Component Properties button at the top of the Object Explorer.

2. You should see the list of properties available for the combobox control. Select the “Items” property and then select Configure Type to see Properties and Methods of the combobox.

3. Select the Methods you would like to use and then click OK. The methods you selected will appear in the Object Explorer. I’ve added Items.AddRange(Object[] items) to add an Array of items Commonly used methods are:

4. Then on my Automation I just added the AddRange method to be populated by the combobox from a Windows Application. Something similar to the following:

I just did the same thing for the other combobox items I wanted to add to my Windows Form combobox and ended up with all of them in one single control.

There are some cases during a project you’re constantly working with the same control and you want to change the default behavior when you drag and drop it from the Object Explorer. Well, here is what you have to do to change the default behavior in OpenSpan Studio (MS-Visual Studio plugin):

1. Select the control type you want and click Configure Type. Here is an example for a button.

2. The Button Control Configuration pops up and now you can select the property, event or method you want to be the default behavior. For the button control the “Click” event is the default behavior.

3. Select the new configuration you want to be the default behavior, right-click on it and then select Set As Default Member.

In the example above I’ve set the PerformClick method to be the default behavior.

The next time I drag and drop a button to the automation it will be the PerformClick method instead of the Click event.

Having started the Oracle CEP successfully was the goal for the second part of this tutorial. Now, we’re going to start building a sample OpenSpan automation to send messages through the JMS interface we created previously and push events from the desktop application to Oracle CEP.

28. Go to OpenSpan Studio (or MS-Visual Studio with OpenSpan plug-in installed) and create a new project. Select OpenSpan Project and name it OpenSpan_OCEP_Tutorial

29. Add a new Windows Form. Add a label, text box and button to your recently created Windows Form. You should have something similar to the following picture:

30. Go to Automation1 (Add a new Automation if you don’t have one) and drag a MessagePublisher component from the Toolbox (Add the component to the Toolbox if it’s not available for you). Make sure it’s set to Global.
31. Highlight the messagePublisher1 component and go to the Properties panel. Select the MessageVendorType and set the Message Connection Properties to connect to the Oracle WebLogic instance we configured on the Part 1 of this tutorial.

You have to provide the following information:


Host: localhost
Port: 7001
Connection Factory Name: osevents_queue_cf
Queue Name: osevents_SampleQ1
Queue Type: Queue
Username: (your username to Oracle WebLogic)
Password: (your password to Oracle WebLogic)
Session Mode: AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE
Make sure you update the connection information to Oracle WebLogic if you haven't followed the tutorial and changed that information along the course of it.


32. Let’s initialize the messageProducer1 component when we start the project. To do that, add an OpenSpan.Runtime.RuntimeHost/ProjectStarted Event component from the Toolbox.

33. Next, add the messagePublisher1 (Start Method) to the Automation1 and then connect OpenSpan.Runtime.RuntimeHost/ProjectStarted to the messagePublisher1. You should end up with something similar to the following:

34. Add the submit button click event, the text box value and messageProducer1 (Send Method) to the Automation1 canvas. Create the message workflow connecting submit button click to the message producer. Set the text of the message connecting the text box value to the msgText variable on the message producer. Your automation should look like this:

35. Run the project, type something on the text box of the Windows form and click Publish.

36. When you click Publish on the Windows form , a JMS message is dispatched from the OpenSpan Runtime to the Oracle WebLogic JMS provider, that message is stored on the osevents_SampleQ1 queue until it’s consumed by the listener on the Oracle CEP project configured on Part 2 of this tutorial. The message content is then displayed on the Oracle CEP console.

37. That message is displayed on the Oracle CEP Console because the query running against the events is simply selecting all events sent to the helloInputChannel.

The HelloWorldBean then gets the text of the message’s body and print it.

Feel free to modify the query running against the events published to this Oracle CEP project or the bean printing the messages to experiment different behaviors.

This concludes the Desktop Events with OpenSpan and Oracle CEP. I hope you could follow along and this tutorial could give you a good start point to work with OpenSpan and CEP engines. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or comments.

On the first part of this tutorial we walked through the steps of Oracle WebLogic JMS configuration. This is a very important step since it’s the base underlying communication system between the major components for the integration between the applications part of this demonstration.

9. Assuming that everything works fine on the infrastructure side of the project you’re now ready to start developing your Oracle CEP application. Go to Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (Start Menu > Oracle WebLogic > Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse).

10. Create a new Oracle CEP Application Project. Go to File > New > Other > Oracle CEP > Oracle CEP Application Project.

11. Name the project OpenSpan_Tutorial and leave all other fields as default.

12. Click Next.

13. On the New Oracle CEP Application Project select “Create an Oracle CEP Application using an application template” and choose Hello World as the template.

14. Click Finish.

15. At this point you should have an Oracle EPN similar to this:

16. Right-click at the OpenSpan_Tutorial canvas and select New… Adapter. Name it jmsAdapter.
17. Go to the config.xml file under the META-INF\wlevs\ directory and add the following configuration:


<jms-adapter>
<name>jmsAdapter</name>
<jndi-provider-url>t3://localhost:7001</jndi-provider-url>
<destination-jndi-name>osevents_SampleQ1</destination-jndi-name>
<user>weblogic_username</user>
<password>weblogic_password</password>
<session-transacted>false</session-transacted>
</jms-adapter>


The above configuration tells the Oracle CEP application to connect to the JMS Provider configured under Oracle WebLogic.

18. Go back to the OpenSpan Tutorial EPN and remove the connection between the helloWorldAdapter adapter and the helloworldInputChannel.

19. Add a connection from the jmsAdapter to the helloworldInputChannel.

20. Right-click on the jmsAdapter component and choose Go to Assembly Source. Add the following to the helloworld-context.xml file


<wlevs:adapter id="jmsAdapter" provider="jms-inbound">
<wlevs:listener ref="helloworldInputChannel" />
<wlevs:instance-property name="converterBean" ref="eventAdapter"/>
</wlevs:adapter>


You’ll also need to add the following bean definition:

<bean id="eventAdapter"class="com.bea.wlevs.example.helloworld.HelloWorldBean"/>

21. Go to the HelloWorldBean java class and add the following imports:


import javax.jms.JMSException;
import javax.jms.Message;
import javax.jms.TextMessage;
import com.bea.wlevs.adapters.jms.api.InboundMessageConverter;
import com.bea.wlevs.adapters.jms.api.MessageConverterException;


22. Change the HelloWorldBean class to implement InboundMessageConverter. To do that, change the class signature to be:


public class HelloWorldBean implements StreamSink, InboundMessageConverter {


23. Then, implement the following required method:


public List convert(Message message) throws MessageConverterException, JMSException {
javax.jms.TextMessage textMessage = (TextMessage) message;
System.out.println("Message Processed: " + textMessage.getText());
return null;
}


24. Save and close all files.

25. Your Oracle EPN should be similar to the following picture:

26. It’s time to deploy your project. Go to the Servers view. Right-click on your Oracle CEP v11.1 instance, click on Add and Remove, select the OpenSpan Tutorial and click on Add. Click Finish.

27. Your project should be deployed successfully and you should see a message similar to this on the Eclipse console:


<Mar 18, 2011 9:43:50 PM EDT> <Notice> <Deployment> <BEA-2045000> <The application bundle "OpenSpan_Tutorial" was deployed successfully to file:/D:/Oracle/Middleware/user_projects/domains/ocep_domain/defaultserver/applications/OpenSpan_Tutorial/OpenSpan_Tutorial.jar with version 1300499030501>
<Mar 18, 2011 9:43:51 PM EDT> <Notice> <Spring> <BEA-2047000> <The application context for "OpenSpan_Tutorial" was started successfully>


Oracle’s Complex Event Processing Engine can be used to monitor large volumes of real-time data feeds but how do you enable your existing applications to trigger and react with the CEP engine?

With OpenSpan Events you can quickly and easily monitor any application or set of applications on a user’s desktop – including Windows, Web, Java, mainframe, cloud-based, virtualized or Citrix-hosted applications – without modifying the original applications. All events and associated data can be sent in real-time to Oracle CEP, as well as stored in an Oracle or other central database for analysis using OpenSpan Analytics, Oracle Hyperion or any other BI or reporting tool.

Here is a step-by-step guide to get you started with OpenSpan Events with Complex Event Processing (CEP) technology. Part 1 of this tutorial is going to cover Oracle WebLogic JMS setup.

1. Download and Install Oracle WebLogic 11g R1 (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/weblogic/downloads/index.html)

2. Download and Install Oracle Complex Event Processing 11gR1 (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/complex-event-processing/downloads/index.html)

3. Configure Oracle CEP plugin on Eclipse Galileo shipped with Oracle WebLogic 11g R1 (http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/doc.1111/e14301/ide_intro.htm#CHDGBGGA)

4. Start your Oracle WebLogic instance (Start Menu > Programs > Oracle WebLogic > User Projects > base_domain > Start Admin Server for WebLogic Server Domain). Wait for the confirmation the server is up and running. You should see a message on the log similar to the following:

<mar 18, 2011 2:58:30 PM EDT> <notice> <weblogicserver> <BEA-000360> <server started in RUNNING mode>

5. Log in to WebLogic Server 11g Administration Console pointing your web browser to http://localhost:7001/console.

6. Click on JMS Modules under Services > Messaging. By default, Oracle WebLogic creates a JMS Module called SystemModule-0. If you don’t have it, you’ll have to create one. Click on SystemModule-0.

7. You also have to create new Queues for the sample configuration where the message exchange between the desktop applications and the Oracle CEP server is going to happen. Click on New and then select Queue. Click Next and give it a name of osevents_SampleQ1. Click Finish. Repeat the process to create another Queue called osevents_SampleQ2.
You also have to create a new connection factory object that’s used to create connections for JMS clients. Name your new connection factory object osevents_queue_cf with the same JNDI name.

8. To test your recently created configuration you may want to configure a few JMS clients to send and receive messages to/from these queues. I’d recommend you taking a look on the bottom of the following resource for a pretty nice and straightforward client configuration available at http://redstack.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/a-simple-jms-client-for-weblogic-11g/.